


Like Water Flowing Underground

by Kleenexwoman



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-20
Updated: 2011-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-27 14:39:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/296938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kleenexwoman/pseuds/Kleenexwoman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marty struggles to fit in with his new reality, but is any other world a better fit?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Water Flowing Underground

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Person](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Person/gifts).



The bathroom in the hall gives Marty more trouble than he expected. It's not that it's the most different thing in his house, but that if he wakes up in the middle of the night to pee, it's easy to forget which universe he's in. He'll grab futilely for the light cord, expecting to see a bare bulb illuminate the rust-and-avocado bathroom, and thrash around in the dark like an idiot before his hand lands on a light _switch_ and he remembers that Linda made Mom and Dad put in special lighting that makes everything look pinkish so she can do her makeup correctly and that the bathroom is all beige now, and then he'll remember where he is. When he is. He doesn't think there's a word for being in a whole alternate universe.

 _Dad went to grad school at UC Berkeley. You remember meeting his old roommate, Sam. They went to protests and poetry readings together. Dad knows Stephen King personally; he sent you that Ramones poster. Dad can cook, but only stir-fry. Pretend it tastes good. He only works four days out of the week because he teaches at the community college. You can't tease him about having students who have crushes on him, he gets flustered. He doesn't eat red meat. You can go into his vinyls, but don't touch his book collection ever. If you run into him smoking outside, he'll tell you not to tell Mom. He always does this. You never tell her. Don't stick around unless you want to hear him talk at you about the plot of his second book._

He has to keep a mental dossier on his family, the things he should remember and the things that never happened. He knows that nothing should be the same--thirty whole years of history have been erased and overwritten. Some things aren't hard, seem to be already there in his memory, just waiting for him to uncover them. Scents, images, emotional associations, dormant and quietly living in his mind without his knowing.

 _Mom does real estate. She likes to joke about being a bored housewife, but you can't tease her about it. You can tease her about her crush on her tennis instructor, though. She quit smoking three years ago and she's really proud of it. She actually likes Jennifer, so don't lie about Jennifer to her, because she'll probably find the truth out anyway. She gets spa treatments. She spends more time with Linda but usually sides with Dave in arguments._

There are some things that happened the same way, against all odds: Marty setting the rug on fire at age eight. The trip to Disneyland when he was ten. The existence of a stray cat named Ziggy that would only let George pet it. The thing that happened at Linda's sixteenth birthday party (the only difference being the type of spaghetti used and how long she locked herself in her room). The way he met Jennifer (math class). Insignificant things that shouldn't stay the same, shouldn't be so crucial that a universe can rely on them.

 _Don't bother Linda when she's doing aerobics. The boutique she works at is never "Paul's Boutique," just "the boutique," because she hates the owner. When she dumps a boyfriend, she'll want to talk about it, but if she gets dumped, she won't. She thinks Mom still wants her to date some guy named Jake. She'll get suspicious if you remember the names of all of her friends._

But so much is different, and there are some things he has to beat into himself to remember, to weed out the old memories and only retain the new. He feels a little scared every time he does it, like something irreplaceable and crucial is being lost, but he tells himself that it's already been lost, that nostalgia is less important than acclimatization.

 _Dave's just an intern but likes to pretend he's not. If you don't laugh at his jokes he just keeps telling them. He's never serious when he talks about politics, but if you don't pretend to take him seriously, he'll get annoyed. Something pretty bad happened to him a few years back, but he's over it, and nobody will say what it is and you're not really expected to know what it is._

If there's anything he's learned from Doc, it's to ask questions, to not be afraid to experiment. He's going to keep trying until he gets it right, until he knows everything, until he fits in.

*

One of the weirder things is that people are actually proud of George, now. He's a minor celebrity, not just for finally getting his book published, but for being _George_. Old students of his come up to him and hug him, ask him how he's doing, ask him to go out to lunch. Of everyone in his family, George has changed the most. Marty's actually pretty proud of that, seeing as he kind of had a lot to do with that, but it does mean that there's even more to get used to. Linda and Dave, underneath their success and Linda's boyfriend and Dave's newfound opinions, are pretty much the same; Mom's thinner and happier, but the same. It's the opposite with George. He has some of the same quirks, the same preferences, the same history, but nearly everything Marty knew about his father (and by extension, more of himself than he realized) has changed.

There's something about being raised with the expectation of failure that stays with you. _You won't make it. Don't even try. They'll all laugh when you fail. You don't need the stress. Keep your head down. Don't complain, at least you have a job/a car/a girlfriend. Be glad they're only giving you the shit they're giving you and no more. Don't ask for anything else._ To his father, it always meant giving up on his own dreams, letting the hope of a life that was more than just vaguely adequate disappear with nothing but a sigh. To Marty, it had always meant something different--flying under the radar, living the best parts of his life without anyone noticing or understanding what it meant until he finally made it. Sneaking off to see Doc before school, hanging out with Jennifer only when her dad wasn't watching and his mom didn't know, trying to get gigs for the Pinheads out of town if Lee's van could make it that far.

Suddenly, everything was validated, and having the hope of success out in the open like that was disorienting, felt like cheating. _I know you'll make it. Try your hardest. We'll all support you. The stress is worth it. You deserve more._ Suddenly everyone thought he and Jennifer were a cute couple, and only Strickland still gave him shit about hanging out with Doc. Suddenly his shitty grades and shitty attendance were a "senior slump" instead of "you're a worthless slacker", suddenly the big question about his future was whether he wanted to go to U of C or shoot for Stanford instead of whether vocational school or Hill Valley Community College was a better fit, hanging out with Doc was "an unusual extracurricular activity" instead of "you're going to get yourself blown up or molested."

There had to be a catch somewhere, and maybe his alternate self, the one who'd grown up in this universe, sensed it too.

*

Paul wasn't in the band anymore, and had been replaced by a kid named Matt that Marty vaguely remembered seeing around school. Apparently Paul and Lee had had a fight a few months ago for some reason so trivial that Marty immediately expunged it from his memory, and Paul had quit the band in a fit of pique. The problem was that Matt kind of freaked Marty out, hanging out in Lee's garage not really saying anything, then applying himself to the bass like a demon.

Marty remembered them doing covers, mostly, because nobody in the Pinheads had wanted to bother with writing anything original yet. When Marty tried to fiddle around with the intro to "Johnny B. Goode," Matt unplugged the amp.

"The fuck are you trying to do with that dinosaur rock shit?" he asked.

Marty strummed futilely before he realized the power had been cut off. "What? What's wrong with Chuck Berry?"

"I thought we were gonna do some hardcore shit," Matt said. "Everything you've been trying to play today has been crap. Huey Lewis? Seriously?"

"We did do "Blitzkrieg Bop"," Lee pointed out.

"What about that shit you wrote last week? I liked that." Matt dug around in a pile of papers and handed a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper to Marty.

 _Your mom and dad just fuck you up  
They drag you in their screwed-up lives  
They shove their issues down your throat  
And make you choke on all their lies_

He flipped the paper over--another song, in the same vein.

 _Daddy's got his Oxfords on the trigger of the rifle  
Mommy's in the oven so she knows her screams are stifled  
Sister's red with papercuts, a razor in her hand  
Brother's gonna run away and join a punk rock band_

It was his handwriting, but Marty couldn't imagine ever writing something that cynical, that bitter. Rock 'n' roll had always been an escape for him, not an emotional outlet. He crumpled up the sheet of paper. "This is kinda dark," he said.

"Yeah!" It was the first time Marty had ever seen Matt look remotely pleased. "It's great, dude! It's like, exposing the rotten heart of lies at the center of this whole bland suburban upper-class shit. Fuckin' hardcore."

Marty tossed the crumpled ball of paper into the farthest corner of the garage, heart pumping hard. Was this really how he'd felt about his family? Was he that kind of an ungrateful little shit? "I don't know, man. What if this gets on an album and my parents hear it?"

"That'd be awesome," Matt said.

"No, that would be kind of cruel," Marty said.

Matt shook his head. He whacked his fist against the garage wall, then slumped down like someone had deflated him. "That's bullshit, man. I thought you were actually hardcore. You're just some fucking suburban chickenshit who doesn't want Mommy and Daddy to know he actually has feelings."

Sometimes, it was like there was this other voice at the back of his head, whispering to him. Marty liked to think that it was a remnant of his other self, the last vestiges of whatever problems and feelings his self that had grown up in this universe had had. He kind of hated it. _He called you a chickenshit. A coward. Are you gonna take that? Just because you're short, just because your dad has money, just because you really did grow up without ever having any problems, anyone telling you that you weren't gonna make it, anyone trying to keep you down? Fuck that. Are you gonna stand there and let him think you're a weakling? A spoiled little shit?_

Marty realized he was clenching his fist, and that Lee was grabbing his shoulder, like he was trying to hold him back. "Let's not break up the band, okay?" Lee said. "How about we compromise--we do the songs, we say Matt wrote 'em."

"Whatever," Matt said.

"Yeah," Marty said, trying to calm himself down. "Sure." But they didn't try to arrange the song that day, and went through three takes of T. Rex's "20th Century Boy" before practice broke up.

*

Marty remembered Grandma McFly as deeply Catholic, always dressed in black since Grandpa McFly had died when he was five. He had scattered memories of his grandfather's smiling face, like his father's but condensed and widened, and the softness of his voice as he sang Marty bits of lilting, vaguely dirty lullabies. Grandma coming over for infrequent visits from Sun City had always been a strained event, and Dad had always seemed to be relieved when she left.

Now Grandma was gone, but Grandpa was alive, and Marty wondered what the hell he had done in the past that would have made that change, whether he should feel guilty or relieved for removing one person and resurrecting another. In any case, Grandpa's visit was a cause for celebration, especially since Marty was, apparently, his favorite.

Unlike his other family members, Marty barely had anything to go on when trying to interact with his grandfather. He tried to catch up, gave brief, cautious answers when asked about his schoolwork and Jennifer and his band, was always a few seconds too slow to catch onto in-jokes or references to things he didn't remember. When had they ever gone fishing? What the hell did _pog mo hoin_ mean? Was Grandpa actually annoyed that they didn't go to church, or was he joking?

When Grandpa finally left, Marty went to his room and tried to absorb and file away the evening. After a few minutes, there was a soft knock on his door.

Marty sat up. "Yeah?"

George opened the door. He leaned against the doorframe, staring at Marty like he wanted to say something. Marty started to get nervous. Did Dad, against all odds, suspect that his kid was an imposter? Was he in trouble? Was there something crucial and obvious he'd missed?

Finally, George said, "Your mother wanted me to talk to you about this." He sighed and shifted his weight. "I really don't care if you smoke pot once in a while, but don't do it when your grandfather's here. It's disrespectful."

Marty's jaw dropped. That was the only problem? And why wasn't his dad grounding him for life? He almost laughed. "Dad, jeez. I don't smoke pot. Just Say No."

George eyed him. "Then what was today about? Are you okay?"

There was so much he could have told George. Dad was a sci-fi writer, he'd written articles about being visited by Darth Vader--Marty had read some of them, curious to see how George had perceived his experience--he was one of the only two people in the world who would have believed Marty, and the other one seemed to be gone forever. Marty thought about the implications of telling his father how his life had changed, about dragging a happy, successful man into the swirl of doubt and confusion that seemed to characterize his life now. "It's just, you know...stuff."

George nodded doubtfully. "Right. I know senior year is pretty tough." He looked like he was waiting for Marty to divulge something, some mundane and teenage secret that would explain everything about how his son had been acting. "If there's anything you want to talk about..."

"I know, I know." Marty put his hand on his guitar.

"Okay." George closed the door, leaving Marty with a strange, empty feeling in his gut. He still hadn't been able to figure out whether he'd been particularly close with this George or not. Apparently George had taken a year off of teaching sometime in the early 70's to take care of Marty while Mom was trying to get started in real estate, but after that, it was hard to tell. Marty got the feeling that if they had been close, it had been something the rest of the family had only been peripherally aware of, some special bond they didn't talk about.

That night, when he got up to go to the bathroom, his hand landed on the beaded metal light cord that had always hung from the ceiling. He froze and touched the wall, hoping the light switch would be there, hoping reality would stay concrete. The linoleum of the hall was tacky and gummy under his bare feet. He padded into the kitchen, trying to tell himself that he was dreaming, that there was no reason his new reality should have suddenly dissolved over the course of the evening.

It was the same old kitchen he'd grown up in, scuffed and rust-colored, with Mom's bottle of Popov out on the counter. His father was sitting at the table in a pool of wan moonlight, back hunched over with the weight of a thousand small disappointments, one hand buried in his dyed black hair, the other clutching a bottle of light beer. He raised his head to press the sweating bottle to the side of his face, and Marty realized that his father's eyes were red, that he was sobbing quietly, the noises almost subsonic, as though he were trying not to disturb anyone.

Marty felt sick. Was this something his father had always done, something he'd never noticed? He'd thought this reality had disappeared, been overwritten. Was this real? Had he vanished from here, left another hole in his parents' lives? Was he here for good?

"Dad," he said. "Dad. It's me."

George looked up at him, his eyes widening, and as he reached out towards Marty everything changed. The kitchen was silent and uninhabited, clean and glass and beige, and the hardwood floor was smooth under Marty's feet.

He stayed frozen, almost hoping against hope that the scene would change again and that his father would reappear, that he could solve the mystery presented to him and snatched back without a trace. Maybe he had been sleepwalking, after all; maybe the unreasoning guilt he'd tried to bury had surfaced to lash out at him, and that was all.

"Marty?" It was his father's voice, and he wondered at how easy it was to tell the difference between his old father and the one he knew now. The basement door clicked open.

Marty whirled around. "Dad? What are you doing down there?"

"Writing." His father stood in the doorway, wiping his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I couldn't sleep again. Want to come down and keep me company?"

Marty hadn't bothered to set foot in the new basement yet--the old one had been an unfinished storage room, filled mostly with cardboard boxes and scuttling centipedes. Of course George had made it his office now, with track lighting, a leather couch, an oak bookcase and a portable TV, and a rolltop desk covered with looseleaf paper and an old-fashioned typewriter. It looked nice. Professional.

They sat on the couch, and George held out his arms. It took Marty a second to catch on, but he leaned against his father, feeling childish and awkward. They were silent for a while. Marty rolled around the past few weeks in his head, wanting to tell George in the unreality of two in the morning, trying to find a place to start.

"Do you remember when you were just a little boy, and I took the whole year off to take care of you?" George murmured. "I don't think you do, but that was the best year of my life." He stroked Marty's hair, and Marty felt a little better, a little more right.

He let his memory drift, remembered George singing nonsense lullabies to him. _I'm an alligator, I'm a mama-papa comin' for you..._ He'd never felt so safe, so loved.

"It was a scary time," George said. "The war, the recession, the environment...we were all so hopeful for the future when you were a baby, but it seemed like all of that hope was gone in just a few years. I thought the world was going to fall apart. I didn't want that for you." He nuzzled Marty. "I thought, well, we didn't change the world, everything's going to hell, the kids are going to do it. They're going to make the world better than we ever could."

 _I did_ , Marty thought. _I made it possible for you to do it. And you'll never know it._

"I want you to do whatever you want," George said. "You don't have to be a professor or sell houses or own a shop or do...whatever it is Dave wants to do."

"Mergers and acquisitions," Marty automatically supplied.

"Yeah, that," George said, and chuckled a little. "There are a lot of ways to succeed in life. Just because you don't want to do what your mother and I did doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it." He squeezed Marty. "I just don't want you to feel like you're settling for what you want to do. We're going to support you no matter what."

Marty thought about the song he'd written, the one he'd crumpled up. "Thanks," he said softly. He rested his head on George's shoulder and tried to forget the glimpse of the future he'd seen, with a job he'd lost, a house that didn't work, and kids that ignored him. "It's just...I know I'm going to screw it up, somehow."

"No, you won't." George kissed the top of his head. "You're my baby and you're going to do fine."

"What if I don't?" Marty sat up. "What if I'm a huge disappointment?" _Will you still love me?_

"There is no way," George said firmly, " _no way_ that you could ever disappoint me. It doesn't matter what you do."

*

The next time it happened, he was sleeping on the leather couch in George's office. It had gotten to be kind of comforting, falling asleep in a dimly-lit room with George clacking away on his typewriter, in a space that never existed before.

He woke up, and George wasn't there. The couch was still leather, but it smelled different. The only light was a purplish-white fluorescent bar, buzzing erratically. It looked like he was in some sort of warehouse, some sort of laboratory--

 _Doc._ He recognized some of the inventions, some of the models; others were unfamiliar, but still looked absolutely like something Doc would make. This wasn't Doc's familiar garage, but the way the space felt was familiar, cluttered and exciting. Doc, he was going to get to see Doc, it might be a Doc he'd never met but he knew he could make his friend understand--

"Hey. Hey, who's there?" It took Marty a second to recognize his own voice, thirty years older. His heart sank. He didn't want to see his own future now--the failure, the disappointment, the life devoid of meaning or real purpose... He snuck a peek at his older self anyway. He looked better, face less lined, hair still blondeish-brown instead of graying at the edges, standing in a rectangle of light in familiar underwear and a Talking Heads T-shirt.

His older self leaned against the doorframe. "If you're that jerk from Lockheed, you should know that about half of what's in here doesn't work yet, so it's useless to steal it, and pretty much everything will electrocute you if you touch it the wrong way. You might as well show yourself if you don't want 20,000 volts where it hurts. Also, anything you think is designed to kill people is probably designed to make waffles."

Marty slowly sat up, and his older self's eyes widened. "Yeah, so, you're not the jerk from Lockheed." He held out his hand to Marty. "C'mere, get up. You won't actually get electrocuted. Lockheed Defense is trying to recruit Doc to make weapons for them--death rays, nukes, whatever--and they like to send corporate spies around. Crazy shit."

"Heavy," Marty muttered. He reached out for his older self, then jerked his hand away and pointed at something that looked complicated. The universe hadn't imploded or anything yet, but touching a different version of yourself had to be bad. "So...that's not a waffle maker?"

"Oh, yeah, no, that one actually is," his older self said. He shrugged. "Doc had to have something to do after he decided the time machine was too much of a risk."

"He never made the time machine?" Marty yelped.

His older self sighed and sat down next to Marty. "Keep it down, he's sleeping." He jerked his head towards the open door. "He really can't pull all-nighters anymore. Kind of sad. But, you know...you get old."

"What year is it, anyway?" Marty asked.

"Right, right," his older self said. "December 4th, 1985...sorry, it's 1 AM, so it's December 5th now." He held up his hand to forestall any questions. "I don't know exactly what you've done or how you know Doc--this isn't the first time this has happened to me, and there are a lot of me out there. He invented a time machine, it took me back to 1955, and I got stuck. Couldn't go back."

"You missed the lightning bolt," Marty said slowly.

His older self nodded. "Yeah. Lightning strikes for less than a second. We had a one in three hundred chance of actually catching the charge."

"Shit," Marty muttered. He had never realized just how slim the chances were of the car catching the wire at exactly the time the lightning struck. "So...you're from an alternate universe. I didn't think you could just, uh, waltz into those. I thought they got erased."

"I don't know how it works," his older self said with a resigned laugh. "Sometimes I just wake up and hey, there's another me."

"So what did you do?" Marty asked. "It must have been weird, and...everything."

"Yeah," his older self said, "we had to move. I couldn't risk accidentally breaking Mom and Dad up. You're in Pasadena right now," he added.

"We...?"

"Doc and me," his older self clarified. "Look, he was the only person I knew and the only person who would understand. We just ended up like this."

"Oh." Marty put his head between his legs, thinking about a life he'd just narrowly missed out on. A life away from his family, his friends, everything he knew... "You never got married, you never had kids, nothing? Just...just Doc, and that's it. That's all."

His older self began to rub his back. "It's not like I can go off and marry some girl and have kids that aren't supposed to exist," he said. "Look, it's not that bad. I have Doc. I have friends, too. And we've done a lot. Doc didn't want to risk messing up everything more by creating the time machine, but I know that somewhere out there, he has. The last one of me who came through here said they just went skipping around in time. He met Plato, Isaac Newton, Jimi Hendrix. Really cool stuff."

"Yeah, wild," Marty said faintly. His whole life gone, only Doc for a tenuous hold on reality...

"It's not so bad," his other self said. "I like my life. It turned out okay. There are a lot of different ways to be happy."

"Marty?" The voice was faint, raspier and thinner than he remembered, but unmistakably Doc's. "Marty, are you awake?" Marty's heart nearly skipped a beat. He'd kept thinking, each time he saw Doc, that it was the last time...

"Ah, he woke up," his older self said, and stood up. "You'd better, uh..."

"I want to see him," Marty said.

His older self shook his head. "It's really not a good idea."

"But I don't know if I'll ever see him again! Look, you can talk to him about this stuff all the time. I don't know if I'll ever get to talk to him again. I don't have anyone else to talk to about being in a completely different life--I'm going crazy." His older self looked dubious. "Please," Marty said, "I really miss him."

His older self sucked in a breath and rubbed the back of his head. "I don't know, man. He's really not doing well nowadays."

"I don't care," Marty said, "I just want to talk to my friend. Please."

"Look," his older self pitched his voice down to a whisper, "he doesn't know about the dimensional hopping thing. He didn't think the first time was real, and after that..."

"I can get him to understand!" Marty hissed. "I know I can!"

"Okay, okay. Fine." His older self held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. "Come on." He called to the door, "Yeah, Doc, I'm up. I've got someone I think you might want to see."

"If it's that Philistine who wants me to make him a Tesla ray, tell him I said no," Doc called.

"No, it's not the Lockheed guy--look, just--" And then the lab in Pasadena was dissolving around Marty, and he grabbed desperately at his older self, at the couch, at the air, anything to hold on, but he was back in George's office in the basement of his house in Hill Valley, and he'd never felt more stranded.

He closed his eyes and laid back down on the leather couch that smelled of his father, trying not to cry. Maybe his life would never be normal, whether it meant something as small as being in a band instead of going for his master's, or whether it meant skipping across realities at random like a stone picked up and skipped across a lake by an unseen hand.

Marty didn't want to believe it was a dream. The idea that the self who'd left him the rich, supportive world he'd created hadn't gone away or been reduced to a voice in the back of his head, but had just left--he had a twin brother, a million billion twins floating around in the multiverse, lives rushing past him as they existed beside him, things he could imagine but never touch, like the sound of water flowing underground.


End file.
